Screening history through art, Rashomon remembers

By Rachel Oppenheimer

Akira Kurosawa's Japanese crime drama Rashomon – translated as “In the Woods” – came to New York University Wednesday evening under the recommendation of Donald P. Gregg, former CIA agent, National Security Advisor, and Ambassador to South Korea. Gregg chose the film because it had “awakened [in him] an interest in Asia, leading to ten years in Japan. If I had the chance of only seeing one more movie, Rashomon would be it.” After first seeing the film in theaters in 1951, Gregg became so transfixed by the atmosphere, legacy, history, and culture of Japan that he went on to build a career on international intelligence and security, devoting extended time periods and special commitment to East Asia. To the disappointment of the event's host and audience, Gregg had last minute cancelled his planned attendance and discussion of the film in order to tend to pressing Korea-centered foreign policy issues.

Holly Carter, the evening's moderator, carried on in Gregg's absence. Carter, a journalist and filmmaker, and Executive Director of BYkids, contributed her own impressions of the film – referencing Kurosawa's various film techniques and considering the work's powerful theme of truth and its elusiveness.

Containing philosophical and psychological overtones, Rashomon artfully and dramatically represents the event of a rape and murder in a forest as reported by four witnesses, each from a unique point of view. In 1951, Rashomon won the grand prize at the Venice Film Festival and has subsequently experienced world fame as a Japanese masterpiece. Carter added that the Japanese people objected to the film's international representation and popularity, concerned that it would give the world an inaccurate and unflattering view of Japan.

Produced in the wake of World War II, some see Rashomon's raw and barren set as symbolic of the atomic bomb's lasting effect on Hiroshima's victims. Of the 240,000 people killed by the bombs, about 120,000 died of injuries and radiation sickness in the weeks, months, and years following August 1945. An NYU audience strikingly of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki generation perhaps still connects Kurosawa's bleak, poor, and violent landscape with the destructive acts of their nation's past.